Each row is a year and each segment counts scene-commentary posts a structural prefilter flagged as decline-leaning, affirming, or carrying both. This is a directional prefilter - a keyword-and-scene gate the notability pass applied - never a computed sentiment score. The counts say a post leaned a direction, not how strongly.

Directional prefilter only. No sentiment score is computed or shown - the segments count how many posts a structural gate flagged in each direction, deduped by message.

Scene sentiment over time
198510
19862
19931
19941
19952
19961
19974
20011
20023
  • Decline-leaning
  • Affirming
  • Both
Scene sentiment over time
YearDecline-leaningAffirmingBoth
1985550
1986101
1993010
1994010
1995200
1996100
1997112
2001100
2002120

1986: decline and affirm, side by side

Two posts from 1986, one leaning to the scene's decline and one affirming its vitality - the directional poles the prefilter separates, shown verbatim from the corpus so the reader judges the tone, not a score.

Decline-leaning

diamond@andromeda.uucp · Thu, 30-Jan-86 20:52:04 EST

By the way, I'm new on the net, and I was REALLY glad to see this newsgroup on it. I don't want to sound insulting, but one of the reasons why I began to lose interest in the full-blown life on the road was the growing lack (lacking growth?) of ... how can I say this ... those really exciting, intelligent, fun, and loving people that we used to meet all the time, even just a couple of years ago. It seems that there is a much-bigger-than-ever infiltration of loud, rude, heavy-metal type kids (for lack of a better description) into the concerts. I guess it's just turning people off. It's doing that to me.

But I can't help wonder if it's me. I met this guy a couple of weeks ago that I once met on a tour about 2.5 years ago. Not only is he an ultra-yuppie, but he now looks at the whole dead scene in an EXTREMELY negative way. I'm kinda scared that I may be headed in that direction without me knowing it. The dead is still by far my favorite group, I go to shows whenever I can get to them, and I thoroughly enjoy them. But I just can't help feeling something is happening to me. I know a few others that feel the same way I do. I'd really like to hear others comments on this subject.

Source: _utzoo/rec.music.gdead.utzoo.mbox · <65@andromeda.UUCP> · Decline-leaning

Affirming

lefko@leadsv.uucp · 1986-02-04 10:56:08 GMT

Another observation about the Dead sceene is that I don't really see more of a proportion of Heavy Metal types than other types. I've noticed more preppies. Maby its because Preppies seem odder to me at Dead shows than Heavy Metal freaks.

Anyway don't give up there are lots of cool people out there its just that you don't notice them because of the loud and obnoxious ones. I've found that even some of the loud and obnoxious ones turn out to be cool too.

This last year there have been a huge ammount of people introduced to the Dead because of the 20th anaversery hype. We'll see who sees it for what it is and who gets bored with it and leaves the sceene. One thing though is that they're there trying it no matter who they are and thats good. The ones that stay wheather obnoxious or not (or whoever they are) get the point. The words and music influence they're lives. Its great!

Source: _ua-genesis/ua-genesis.mbox · <798@leadsv.UUCP> · Affirming

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